It’s after 8 years that internationally known Malayali director Adoor Gopalakrishnan is
making a feature film. Naturally, excitement knows no bounds.
Pinneyum, released today, seen as a movie isolated from the fact that
Adoor made it, disappoints. One misses the finesse with which his other
creations like Kodiyettam, Vidheyan, Elipathayam or Nizhalkuthu was made.
Pinneyum rolls
on in the same low sruthi, with no spark of surprise elements anywhere. Not
just that, the supposed realism is just not realism at all. Dialogue delivery is not natural often.
There is no gradual
build up to that one important decision in the protagonist’s life. With just a
few hasty scenes, he and his family resort to a botched up crime that gets resolved in an equally hasty manner.
The subtle nuances of life in Adoor’s earlier scripts are missing in Pinneyum. Gone is the carefully
crafted dialect in Adoor films. Dileep and Kavya Madhavan are not fluent in the Central Travancorean dialect.
Acting honours go to Indrans first, then Kavya for that one
last scene. KPAC Lalitha brought some sunshine into Pinneyum in a cameo, acting
and saying her dialogues very naturally. The boy who acted as the murdered man’s
son is very good, though he comes in just two scenes. Nedumudi Venu and
Vijayaraghavan look at home in their parental roles. Dileep’s role and acting are nothing to write home about.
Why Adoor had to resort to an old and weather beaten crime
story of the last century beats me. That he dealt with what happens to the
family of the criminal afterwards, is something new all right, but that could
have taken centrestage instead of making it look like an after thought. In the
second half, things move at breakneck speed. A few touching scenes involving Kavya, Dileep,
and Indrans are positive points to note.I wish I had more positive things to say about the movie.
Very sorry about that, but it’s the truth.
